I am a consultant, speaker, and blogger that is passionate about enabling B2B companies to define, implement and measure best practices to turn customer experience into their biggest sales and brand differentiator. Using the Sellers' Compass methodology, I work with companies to accelerate their revenue cycles by aligning culture, processes and systems outward to customers and markets. I'm looking for innovation and best practices to share with my readers.

Being Contextually Relevant Increases Customer Loyalty

It’s like the old 1980s ad “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”; success today requires you to always be relevant.

Relevance is a table stake across the entire lifecycle of a seller-buyer relationship, not just when you’re making the sale or answering a customer service question.

As buyers move through on their journey, what is relevant to them changes. In fact, it changes at each step of the buyers’ journey. Relevance is defined by the situation, pressures and feelings the buyer has at each step; in other words it’s contextual. It applies as much to information as it does to actions taken. Understanding what is contextually relevant for each buyer at any point in time is a major challenge for vendors. It’s not like you can constantly ask them.

Now you don’t have to. There is a rise of software vendors that capture and analyze buyers’ digital actions and turn them into actionable behavioral patterns. Coupling these behavioral patterns with in-depth buyers’ journeys, vendors can decipher each buyer’s context. The result is actionable data to more effectively personalize content, landing pages, search results, emails, social communications, and sales and support calls, as well as products to meet evolving customer expectations.

Coveo, one of the industry’s fastest growing software vendors, couples content relevance with front-line collaboration. According to Louis Tetu, CEO, “Coveo builds a unified, federated knowledge index of all the fragmented data and information an enterprise has and merges it with what customers seek.”

The solution indexes every scrape of information within the four walls of an organization including data locked in mainframes, cloud applications and on the web to deliver a single view of the most relevant content based on a customer’s current situation. The index even tracks how different customers, market segments and employees rate the trust-worthiness of indexed information. For a call center agent, that can spell the difference between a successful customer experience and a frustrating one. To achieve this level of customer insight, Coveo believes companies need to put the Long Tail of knowledge to use.

The Long Tail of knowledge can pay off big time in a Seller’s quest to discover what buyers’ do before they ‘raise their hand’. Coveo compares the ‘experience’ patterns created by prior anonymous buyers with current visitor interactions to determine where the buyer is in their journey and what their contextual situation is. Based on the buyer’s current behavior, Coveo finds the closest ‘experience’ pattern and uses it to determine, in real time, the most relevant content, product, web page, etc. to present to that buyer. While Coveo matches anonymous visitors to the best-fit behavior pattern it also detects, in real time, when the buyer’s actions diverge and require different content and experience.

Tetu shared that “the more journeys you capture, the more information you collect, the more relevant your responses become.” He claims that vendors can use Coveo to define their content strategy based on the asset access patterns mapped to which types of buyers did and did not convert. Tetu believes that Coveo makes “one-to-one marketing a reality.”

Other vendors are approaching behavioral analytics in different ways. Totango focuses on identifying post-purchase behavioral patterns of SaaS vendor customers from the point of their freemium trial onward. Their knowledge base is heavily rooted in analyzing product usage to identify buy and churn signals. Integrated with help desk, inbound and marketing automation systems, Totango can personalize user interactions to keep customers engaged and loyal.

A European vendor making inroads into the North American market is Selligent. Their behavioral analytics platform utilizes big data to create actionable behavioral profiles that enable marketers to optimize lead nurturing, conversion and monetize targeting across channels.

Relationship and digital marketers face an array of challenges from rapidly evolving buyer expectations, changing media landscapes and new ways that consumers purchase products. Marketers need to go beyond demographic, psychographic and geo/location segmentation and capture, analyze and execute on behavioral data about their consumers. Campaigns must be contextually relevant, personalized, and synchronized across the channels that buyers frequent.

“It’s not enough to show increases in page views, paid search click-thrus, and emails open rates. The expectation is conversion into revenue that is directly traceable back to marketing campaigns,” says Andre Lejeune, CEO of Selligent. “That means delivering the right message or offer at the right time through the right channel to the right individuals. Unfortunately, traditional page-oriented web analytics, data management platforms, content management, and marketing automation systems were never designed to capture, analyze, and execute on behavioral data or deliver the level of detailed actionable insights that today’s marketers need to be successful.”

Marketing resources are not wasted by treating visitors with a one-size-fits-all approach; Selligent’s behavioral targeting is integrated with a robust marketing automation platform built on a real-time 360 degree, omni-channel view of the consumer. The Selligent’s Behavior application automatically scores each visitor, anonymous and known, based their intent to buy and the products of interest. High-value visitors are spotted in real-time and their potential lifetime value is quickly determined by pattern-matching their behaviors with the profiles of current “big purchasers” and key customers.

Purpose-built to drive higher marketing conversion rates, Selligent’s behavioral analytics are used to automate dynamic campaigns, offers and personalized interactions based analyzing, executing on and optimizing deep insights into the behaviors and opinions of known and anonymous buyers. This innovative solution reduces the noise that marketers battle on a daily basis and enables them to quickly identify, track and interact with the highest potential visitors.

A majority of companies don’t know what they know. And in the case of customer experience, this can have huge consequences. While many customer experience professionals are focused on siloed channels and interactions that map back to specific metrics – they need to look at the overall picture. Companies should be seeking a Return on Knowledge – or ROK – as Coveo says. Leverage the collective knowledge you have about your customers to improve their experience. But to do so, companies must first have access to this knowledge, and reuse it as much as possible.

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